Advanced Consultancy ERP

Challenge

The IT consultancy company required an advanced web-based service management tool for organization and tracking. The project’s key goal was providing managers, consultants and accountants with the ability to manage customers, purchase orders, services, invoicing, payments and employees.

Main functionalities include:

• Services defined as a group of employees allocated for the function acquired by a client
• Hourly packages to offer clients a choice of extra and overtime hours
• Notion of functions, which must be associated with a service immediately following a client’s service purchase
• Invoice generation
• Reporting with hourly figures (normal, overtime and on-call) and expenses

The project’s spec, written partly in Portuguese requiring an in-house translation, numbered over 60 pages. The company modified the description of several modules (commissions, purchase orders and invoices generation) throughout the development stages. However, in spite of these changes and language variances, only a few mockups were necessary on the UI side.

Solution

To meet JBay’s client’s demand for an extensive UI, Redwerk selected GWT to build it. Doing so dramatically reduced development costs compared to creating it from the ground up using HTML/CSS and Javascript. SOAP calls were integrated and respective web services used since the app had to assimilate with a broader existing ecosystem of other parts and databases (like the employee directory). Our SOAP interface allows other services to easily integrate.

The application was designed with multi-layered architecture in mind. A business logic layer was implemented using a rich domain model pattern. Both business logic and business data are encapsulated in model classes, which are housed in a database using a data access layer. The data access layer uses JPA and its implementation, Oracle Toplink, as an interface to the database. The services layer was implemented as a set of stateless beans. For communication between it and the next layer (GWT services), data transfer objects were used. Data visualization was finished using SmartGWT (GWT-based framework for quick creation of AJAX applications).